Our Lady of the Sphere

Diving into a world that we lost, without ever existing - the fantasy of the past revived in its distorted form thanks to the artist's imagination in the present; actually, now also in the past, but not because of the date of creation in 1969, but because Larry Jordan's work was never truly "modern," and it is just an eternally outdated song. It is commendable that it presents to the common human and viewer's expectation a perversely distorted mirror of surreal visions of this seemingly normal world, but the main problem is that, like most Anglo-Saxon authors, it cannot truly reject such a world and thus create a truly new world - it always returns to the need to create a form of the world as we know it, even though it is an imaginary world that reveals a deeper, invisible, or transcendental plane in every moment of projection of the world we are familiar with. Hence the fondness of many American experimental filmmakers of that time for Zen-Buddhist mysticism, and this film was also supposed to be inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Martin Čihák unconsciously captured it precisely when he wrote that Jordan's films "do not work centrifugally, but uniformly. (...) ...Jordan creates a new space." Exactly. Like the seamlessness of Hollywood, here too we tend to create a new example of a world, space, and film without seams, absence, and fractures: film allows us to immerse ourselves in a dream reality that only enriches our everyday world with a new level, but it does not offer a means to truly build a new world: for that, Jordan would have to start from precisely opposite premises, namely to first reveal the nonexistence in the heart of the current world rather than a deeper level of existence. (05.12.2019)